green and luxuriant,
brings us into touch at once with earlier ideas and habits of the
race--makes us more able not only to understand, but also to sympathise
with, our ancient ancestors of the naked-and-not-ashamed era of
culture. Views formed exclusively in the North tend too much to imitate
the reduced gentlewoman's outlook upon life; views formed in the
Tropics correct this refractive influence by a certain genial and
tolerant virile expansion, not to be learned at the Common, Clapham.

To one whose economic pendulum has hitherto oscillated between selfish
luxury in Mayfair and squalid poverty in Seven Dials, there is indeed a
world of novelty in the first view of the tropical poverty that is not
squalid but contentedly luxurious--of the dusky father with his wife or
wives (the mere number is a detail) sprawling at full length, half
clad, in the eye of the sun, before the palm-thatched hut, while the
fat black babies and the fat black little pigs wallow together almost
indistinguishably in the dust at his side, just out of reach of the
muscular foot that might otherwise of pure wantonness molest them. What
a flood of light it all casts upon the future possibilities of society,
that leisured, cultureless household, on whose garden-plot yam or
bread-fruit or bananas or sweet potatoes can be grown in sufficient
quantity to support the family without more labour than in England
would pay for its kitchen coals; where the hut is but a shelter from
rain, or a bed-curtain for night, and where the untaxed sun supplies
the place of a drawing-room fire all the year round, and warms the
water for the baby's bath at nothing the gallon! If there is any man
who doesn't sympathise with his dusky brother when he sees him thus at
home in his airy palace--any man who doesn't fraternise closely with
his kind when thus brought face to face with our primitive existence, I
don't envy him his stern and wild Caledonian ethics. The beach-comber
instinct should be strong in all sane minds. Or if that blunt way of
putting it perchance offend the weaker brethren, let us say rather, the
spirit of the Lotus-eaters. For the man who doesn't want to eat of the
Lotus just once in his life has become too civilised: the iron of the
Gradgrind era of universal competition and payment by results has
entered to deeply into his sordid soul. He wants a course of Egypt and
Tahiti.

Oh, yes; I know what you are going to object, and I grant it at once:
the i